The antiblack racism in the multiracial movement from the 1990s did not fit with my multiracial college activism, and yet it stuck with me. It unsettled me to understand how politicians and the media manipulated multiracialism into an alignment of "my people" with the politics of the Far Right. Understanding the split dividing national multiracial advocacy groups from college-based activists helped me see why some of my closest friends around the country, who were mixed black and white and who grew up with close ties to African American communities, didn't want anything to do with this multiracial thing. Why weren't their stories a part of the burgeoning narrative of mixed-race? Other questions loomed for me: In our celebrations of mixed-race, were we excluding or dismissing the experiences, histories, and racializations of other minoritized communities? How could multiracialism work to dismantle and not fortify the privileges of whiteness? How could we articulate our agenda in a way that might forge cross-racial coalitions, instead of separations?

Of all the racist things people do, living out white privilege might be the most insidious. White privilege is not just the assumptions that get white people treated better by employers and loan officers. It’s also the mental architecture that permits white people to avoid thinking of themselves as “white” — even as whiteness is assumed as the norm, and everyone who lacks it as “other.” White privilege is most potent when it goes unconsidered.

It will be nearly impossible to avoid considering white privilege after reading “When I Was White: A Memoir.” Author Sarah Valentine is that rare person who has lived both with white privilege and without it, and her account is moving and analytically rigorous.

Literature has given us light-skinned blacks who “passed” as white, from famed critic Anatole Broyard to figures in the poetry of Pittsburgh-based poet Toi Derricotte. Ms. Valentine’s story is something else again. She was born in 1977, and grew up mostly in the North Hills, one of three children in a tightly knit Catholic family. Her parents were white, and so, therefore, was she — until she learned, at age 27, that her biological father, whom she never knew, was African American…

Born on June 20, 1890, Posey grew up in a wealthy African-American household in Homestead. His father, Cumberland “Cap” Posey Sr., was general manager for the Delta Coal Co., president of Diamond Coal and Coke, and president of the Pittsburgh Courier Publishing Co., which became one of the nation’s most influential African-American newspapers.

At Homestead High School, Posey starred as a power-hitting right fielder on the baseball diamond, a fullback on the football field and a dominant guard on the basketball court. Posey attended Penn State University and then the University of Pittsburgh before landing at the Pittsburgh Catholic College of the Holy Ghost, now Duquesne University. He played basketball there and led his team in scoring for three years as “Charles Cumbert,” a fake name used to gain eligibility as a “white” player. While Posey never graduated from college, he established a reputation as one of the region’s top athletes…